The king had heard this about Tirhakah king of Cush: “Look, he has set out to fight against you.” So he again sent messengers to Hezekiah, saying,

And, when Hezekiah had received the letter at the hand of the messengers, and had read it, then went he up to the house of Yahweh, and Hezekiah spread it out before Yahweh.

‘Therefore their inhabitants were powerless,
They were shattered [in spirit] and put to shame;
They were like plants of the field, the green herb,
As grass on the housetops is scorched before it is grown up.

And it came to pass before Isaiah had gone out into the middle city that the word of Jehovah came to him saying,

Now Hezekiah had said unto Isaiah, What sign is there, that Yahweh will heal me, - and that I shall go up on the third day, to the house of Yahweh?

And Isaiah the prophet cried to Jehovah, and he brought the shadow back on the degrees by which it had gone down on the dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward.

At that time Berodach-Baladan, the son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sent a letter and a present to Hezekiah, for he had heard that Hezekiah had been sick.

At this, Hezekiah replied to Isaiah, "What you've spoken from the LORD is good," because he had been thinking, "Why not, as long as there's peace and security in my lifetime"?"

And he did evil in the sight of Jehovah, like the abominations of the nations that Jehovah had dispossessed from before the children of Israel.

And he built again the high places that Hezekiah his father had destroyed; and he reared up altars to Baal and made an Asherah, as did Ahab king of Israel; and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them.

And he built altars in the house of Jehovah, of which Jehovah had said, In Jerusalem will I put my name.

And he made his son go through the fire, and made use of secret arts and signs for reading the future; he gave positions to those who had control of spirits and to wonder-workers; he did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, moving him to wrath.

And he set the graven image of the Asherah that he had made, in the house of which Jehovah had said to David and to Solomon his son, In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, will I put my name for ever;

But they would not hearken, and Manasseh led them astray to do more evil than the nations that Jehovah had destroyed from before the children of Israel.

“Since Manasseh king of Judah has committed all these detestable things—greater evil than the Amorites who preceded him had done—and by means of his idols has also caused Judah to sin,

And Manasseh shed very much innocent blood, till he had filled Jerusalem with it from one end to another; beside his sin with which he made Judah to sin, in doing evil in the sight of Jehovah.

And he did evil in the sight of Jehovah, as Manasseh his father had done;

and he walked in all the way that his father had walked in, and served the idols that his father had served, and worshipped them;

But the people of the land smote all them that had conspired against king Amon; and the people of the land made Josiah his son king in his stead.

He practiced what the LORD considered to be right, living the way his ancestor David had lived, turning neither to the right nor to the left.

Eighteen years after King Josiah had begun to reign, the king sent Azaliah's son Shaphan, grandson of Meshullam the scribe, to the LORD's Temple. He told him,

Then, after reading it, Shaphan the scribe went in to the king and gave him an account of what had been done, saying, Your servants have given out the money which was in the house, and have given it to the overseers of the work of the house of the Lord.

And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.

So Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam and Achbor and Shaphan and Asaiah, went to Huldah the woman prophet, the wife of Shallum, the son of Tikvah, the son of Harhas, keeper of the robes, (now she was living in Jerusalem, in the second part of the town;) and they had talk with her.

Because, tender, was thy heart, and thou didst humble thyself before Yahweh when thou heardest what I had spoken against this place and against the inhabitants thereof - that they should become a desolation and a curse, and didst rend thy clothes, and weep before me, therefore also, I, have hearkened - declareth Yahweh.

And the king went up into the house of Jehovah, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which had been found in the house of Jehovah.

And the king commanded Hilkijah the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the doorkeepers, to bring forth out of the temple of Jehovah all the vessels that had been made for Baal, and for the Asherah, and for all the host of the heavens; and he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried the ashes of them to Bethel.

And he abolished the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense on the high places in the cities of Judah, and the environs of Jerusalem; and them that burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the constellations, and to all the host of heaven.

Josiah brought out the Asherah from the house of the Lord to the Brook Kidron outside Jerusalem, and burned it there, and ground it to dust, and threw its dust on the graves of the common people [who had sacrificed to it].

And he had the houses pulled down of those who were used for sex purposes in the house of the Lord, where women were making robes for the Asherah.

And he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from Geba even to Beer-sheba; and he broke down the high places of the gates, those at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, and those on the left hand of any going in at the gate of the city.

And he abolished the horses that the kings of Judah had appointed to the sun at the entrance of the house of Jehovah, by the chamber of Nathan-melech the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs, and burned the chariots of the sun, with fire.

And the king broke down the altars that were on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars that Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of Jehovah, and he shattered them, removing them from thence, and cast the powder of them into the torrent of Kidron.

And the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Zidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom the abomination of the children of Ammon, did the king defile.

The stone pillars were broken to bits and the wood pillars cut down, and the places where they had been were made full of the bones of the dead

Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, the high place that Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who caused Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he broke down; and burned the high place, stamped it small to powder, and burned the Asherah.

And Josiah turned himself, and saw the sepulchres that were there on the mount; and he sent and took the bones out of the sepulchres, and burned them upon the altar, and defiled it, according to the word of Jehovah, that the man of God had proclaimed, who proclaimed these things.

So Josiah said, "Let him rest and let no man move his bones." So they left his bones undisturbed with the bones of the prophet who had come from Samaria.

And all the houses also of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made to provoke Jehovah to anger, Josiah removed, and did to them according to all the acts that he had done in Bethel.

After he had slaughtered all the priests who served at the high places and burned their bones on those high places, he returned to Jerusalem.

Surely there had not been held such a passover as this, from the days of the Judges who judged Israel, - nor all the days of the kings of Israel, and the kings of Judah;

Moreover the necromancers and the soothsayers, and the teraphim and the idols, and all the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, Josiah took away, that he might perform the words of the law which were written in the book that Hilkijah the priest had found in the house of Jehovah.

And before him there had been no king like him that turned to Jehovah with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there his like.

But Jehovah turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath, wherewith his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him.

So Yahweh said: Even Judah, will I remove from my presence, as I have removed Israel, - and will reject this city, which I had chosen, even Jerusalem, and the house as to which I had said, My Name, shall be, there.

In his days Pharaoh-Nechoh king of Egypt went up against the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates; and king Josiah went against him; but Nechoh slew him at Megiddo, when he had seen him.

And he did evil in the sight of Jehovah, according to all that his fathers had done.

And Pharaoh-Nechoh had him bound at Riblah in the land of Hamath, that he might not reign in Jerusalem; and laid a tribute upon the land of a hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold.

Jehoiakim paid Pharaoh the required amount of silver and gold, but to meet Pharaoh's demands Jehoiakim had to tax the land. He collected an assessed amount from each man among the people of the land in order to pay Pharaoh Necho.

And he did evil in the sight of Jehovah, according to all that his fathers had done.

In his days, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up [because] Jehoiakim had become his servant [for] three years; then he turned and rebelled against him.

The Lord sent against him Babylonian, Syrian, Moabite, and Ammonite raiding bands; he sent them to destroy Judah, as he had warned he would do through his servants the prophets.

Verily, at the commandment of Jehovah it came to pass against Judah, that they should be removed out of his sight, for the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he had done;

and also because of the innocent blood that he had shed; for he had filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and Jehovah would not pardon.

And the king of Egypt came not again any more out of his land, for the king of Babylon had taken all that belonged to the king of Egypt, from the torrent of Egypt to the river Euphrates.

And he did evil in the sight of Jehovah, according to all that his father had done.

And he brought out thence all the treasures of the house of Jehovah, and the treasures of the king's house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold that Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of Jehovah, as Jehovah had said.

And he did evil in the sight of Jehovah, according to all that Jehoiakim had done.

For, because the anger of Jehovah was against Jerusalem and against Judah, until he had cast them out from his presence, Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon.

On the ninth of the month, when the famine had become severe in the city, - and there had come to be no bread for the people of the land,

The city was breached, and the entire army left during the night through the gate that stood between the two walls beside the royal garden, even though the Chaldeans had surrounded the city. They escaped through the Arabah,

And when they had taken him, they brought him to Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon to Riblah, where they reasoned with him.

Zedekiah's sons were executed while Zedekiah was forced to watch. The king of Babylon then had Zedekiah's eyes put out, bound him in bronze chains, and carried him off to Babylon.

And he had the house of the Lord and the king's house and all the houses of Jerusalem, even every great house, burned with fire;

And Nebuzar-adan the captain of the body-guard carried away captive the rest of the people that were left in the city, and the deserters that had deserted to the king of Babylon, and the rest of the multitude.

The captain of the guard also confiscated the fire pans, basins, and whatever had been crafted of pure gold and pure silver.

The two pillars, the one sea, and the bases which Solomon had made for the house of Jehovah: for the brass of all these vessels there was no weight.

Eighteen cubits, was the height of each pillar, and, the capital thereupon was of bronze, and, the height of the capital, was three cubits, and, the lattice-work and pomegranates upon the capital round about, the whole, was of bronze; and, like these, had the second pillar, upon the lattice-work.

He took a court official who had been appointed over the warriors from the city; five trusted royal aides found in the city; the secretary of the commander of the army, who enlisted the people of the land for military duty; and 60 men from the common people who were found within the city.

And as for the people that remained in the land of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had left behind, over them he appointed Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan.

And all the captains of the forces, they and their men, heard that the king of Babylon had appointed Gedaliah, and they came to Gedaliah to Mizpah, namely, Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and Johanan the son of Kareah, and Seraiah the son of Tanhumeth the Netophathite, and Jaazaniah the son of a Maachathite, they and their men.

And in the thirty-seventh year after Jehoiachin, king of Judah, had been taken prisoner, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, Evil-merodach, king of Babylon, in the first year of his rule, took Jehoiachin, king of Judah, out of prison;

Jehoiachin changed his prison clothes and had his meals in the king’s presence regularly all the days of his life;